The best films of 2013: the ballots

A look at the most notable films, performances, and other cinematic achievements of the past year.

Tasha Robinson’s top 15 films of 2013

Short Term 12

The Act Of Killing

Her

Stories We Tell

12 Years A Slave

Inside Llewyn Davis

A Hijacking

Blue Caprice

Gravity

Upstream Color

American Hustle

Wadjda

Room 237

All Is Lost

Let The Fire Burn

On the cusp

It’s frustrating that Berberian Sound Studio, which Noel praised so highly on its theatrical release, only played for a week here in Chicago, and had ended its run on VOD as we approached our deadlines. That, The Past, and These Birds Walk are the films I most regret not catching in time for these lists. A few things that just missed making my countdown: The ethereal yet grounded Canadian feature War Witch follows a young girl as she’s abducted from her devastated home village in an unnamed African country. As she’s forced to become a child soldier and a warlord’s mascot, the film sticks closely to her point of view to put a personal face on a common tragedy. It’s powerful without being melodramatic or manipulative: It captures the poetic, lyrical vision of a girl whose worldview has been heavily swayed by ignorance, poverty, superstition, emotion, and the hallucinatory drug her captors force on their recruits. Also on the cusp: John Sayles’ Go For Sisters, the indie godfather’s latest quiet, casually competent, absorbing riff on a genre, this time on procedural crime movie. And Don Jon, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s feature directing debut, has its significant problems, but it’s still a funny, tender, almost ridiculously ambitious first feature, crammed with conversation-launching concepts, and directed with promising style.

Scene

Whipping a fellow captive, 12 Years A Slave

High in the running on any list of 2013’s most grueling, emotionally excoriating movies, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave puts its protagonist, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) through a physical and emotional meat grinder, after he’s kidnapped from the north in 1841 and sold south as a slave. In the film’s most agonizing scene, Northup’s owner Edwin (Michael Fassbender) orders him to viciously whip another slave (Patsey, played by Lupita Nyong’o). The situation is full of complicated subcurrents: In his own horrifically twisted, possessive way, Edwin loves Patsey, which infuriates his neglected wife (Sarah Paulson), who urges on the beating. But Edwin seems to hate both Patsey and himself because of his attachment, and his power over her and Solomon manifests as sadism and destructive mania. The sequence is throat-closingly graphic and physically brutal, but it’s also emotionally wrenching: All four participants are hurting and victimized in their ways, but only Edwin and his wife have the power and privilege to foist their pain off onto other slaves, and to magnify it vastly in the process. While Patsey is forced to physically suffer to salve Edwin’s inner conflict, Solomon has to choose whether to savage an innocent to protect himself, or stand up for what’s right, knowing it’s just likely to make things worse for both him and Patsey. It’s the prisoner’s dilemma given terrifying life, in a scene that’s unforgettable both for its raw power, and for the swirling, complicated undercurrents that give it depth.

Orphan

A Hijacking

Tobias Lindholm’s tense feature about Somali pirates and a hijacked cargo ship seems familiar in a year that also provided the Tom Hanks movie Captain Phillips, but Lindholm’s take on similar subject matter has a different thrust, and a different center: Instead of focusing on the ship’s captain, he looks at a crew member caught between the pirates and his ultimate boss, the shipping-company CEO who insists on handling the hostage negotiations himself. To some degree, the film is sympathetic to both men, but it’s also calmly brutal about the reality of both of their situations: The CEO has a board to answer to, a reputation to maintain, and a bottom line to worry about, while the hijacking victims just want to survive, and are powerfully affected by the CEO’s choices and failings. Directing in a fuss-free, stripped-bare style, Lindholm makes his film less thrilling than Captain Phillips, but far more nakedly realistic, and just as immersive. It’s also more far-ranging and ambitious: as much a story about class differences as a story about men with guns.